Professor of Biology Fotis C. Kafatos says he believes both broad global projects and investigator-initiated projects are both important to biological science.

"Biologists [should be] pushing to expand support of science, rather than arguing about shifts of support from this to that," Kafatos says.

Ethics

NIH and the Department of Energy have also jointly formed the Working Group on the Ethical Legal and Social Implications of Human Genome Research to examine ethical issues related to the project.

The committee has focused its discussions on quality of and access to genetic tests, privacy issues involving genetic testing and public and professional education, according to an NIH report.

"This is one of the first big science projects in which ethical considerations were given a lot of attention before it began," Church says.

He says that most ethical issues the committee must confront have come up before in other biological research.

Also, the majority of the project's results will be helpful, and therefore less subject to criticism, Church says.

The benefits to a person of knowing he or she has hypercholesterolemia, a hereditary inability to remove cholesterol from the body, for instance, will far outweigh the chances that it will hurt his or her jobs opportunities if an employer finds out, he says.

Gilbert says that with the knowledge obtained by the project, the U.S. will be forced to move towards much tighter privacy laws.

"At one level, one wants to know about one's own genes and how they affect physical development," Gilbert says.

But, he points out, it may not be desirable for others to know about one's genetic makeup.

"There is a constant battle between the right of the individual human that should be valued, against problems of classification," Gilbert says.

Patenting Gene Sequences

The NIH has filed patent applications for partial gene sequences that have been found, according to a statement by James D. Watson, director of the National Center for Human Genome Research and the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, says the patenting of sequences has become mired in controversy.

"The issues and implications surrounding patenting partial gene sequences are numerous and complex," Watson says. "I am sympathetic to the views expressed to me by the many members of the scientific community who believe patenting partial gene sequences may not be in the best interest of scientific or economic progress."

Gilbert says the patenting of sequences does not affect science.

"Patenting gives one control over a discovery for eventual commercial use," he says. "Patenting inventions is a good idea, but these sequences don't have great value as inventions."